Of Suicide & Justice
by JosephineSilver
Summary: [In which sensitive subject matter is breached] ALICE. A young girl. A mortal. Her whole life ahead of her. Until it was all just too much. THE GIANT WAR. It changed a lot of lives forever. It took away the innocence of so many. The mortals aren't the only suicidal one. PERCY JACKSON. Of course, he's in the middle of it, again. Oneshot. Rated a high 'T'.


Hi.

This is more serious - more emotional and darker - than anything I've ever written before. I was aiming for evocative and provoking, but I think I got depressing instead.

I regret nothing.

**TRIGGER WARNING: suicide and PTSD and sensitive subject matter lie beyond this authors note. Fair warning.**

DEDICATION: to anyone who's lost someone to suicide.

(The characters in the following fic are completely fictional. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and no fault of the author.)

* * *

[¥]

* * *

You post the video. Click 'upload' and wait.

It's too late to turn back now.

You share the link on Facebook. You watch it circulate.

You see how many hits the video gets. How many likes. How many dislikes.

You seeth. And you wait. And you grieve.

Because this video isn't closure. It's an attack.

You want the people who did this to your sister to know.

To hurt.

But you know they won't. Why should they?

They didn't kill her. Not directly, anyway.

You want this video seen. You want it heard. You don't want Alice's story to be tragic and unknown.

You want your sister back.

But you know she's gone forever.

* * *

**-X-**

* * *

The video begins to buffer, and you click pause, waiting for the gray bar to inch further along.

Once it has, you click 'play.'

* * *

_A girl. She has pale skin and dark hair. Her face is gaunt, and it looks like she might have bags under her eyes; it's hard to tell, though, because her mascara has run._

_Black tear tracks are the marks of her grief, carved into her face._

_Words float across the screen._

**_(Alice Bransen. 1998 - 2013)_**

_The words slowly fade into a black background, and a picture takes its place. And then another. And another._

_The pictures all show the same girl - different poses, different places, different ages - but the same girl._

_As the slides how continues, a vice begins to speak._

_'This is my sister. Alice. Ali, we call h - called her.'_

_A sob._

_'She was a good girl. She sucked at math and science, was average at her other classes, and had had her fair amount of detentions - but she was good. She was innocent, and sweet, and alive.'_

_The black screen again._

_'And then - then she wasn't.'_

_More images appear. These ones more confronting._

_The girl from the others slides - Alice - with her ribs showing through her flesh. With her arms scarred with marks like ladders. Short videos of her crying, silently but passionately. Her mouth moves, and no sound comes out, but it's easy to read her lips_.

**_I DON'T WANT TO LIVE LIKE THIS ANYMORE. I CAN'T._**

_The screen goes black._

_'That video was sent to me by my sister when I was at school, on lunch break. She'd said she was sick that morning, and I had gone in by myself.'_

_'I should have seen it. I should have known._

_'Our parents both worked full time. Once I had gone to our school, Goode, Alice had the house to herself. She didn't need to worry about being caught.'_

_'About being saved.'_

_'When I got the text, when I opened that video...I froze. For a minute or two, I didn't know what to do or think. At that will always haunt me. I will always think, in the back of my mind, that if I had reacted quicker, maybe we could've got there in time.'_

_'Maybe we could've saved her.'_

_'But Alice didn't want to be saved. She just wanted it to be over.'_

_'At first I thought the video was her way of being melodramatic. But then I read the text that came after it.'_

_The girls voice grows thicker and higher. She is clearly holding back tears._

_'"I love you, Dani, but I can't live like this anymore. I can't take this kind of abuse daily. Death is preferable to this. So sorry I wasn't stronger. Ali xxx".'_

_Her voice is angrier. Louder._

_'That is sick. It makes me sick. She apologizes for NOT BEING STRONG ENOUGH. And there are horrible people out there that say, well, shouldn't she be?'_

_'You disgust me._'

'_You think my sister wanted to die at age fifteen? You think she wanted her family to be torn apart like this?'_

_'Of course she didn't. Alice was a good, loving girl; and good, loving girls don't wish this on anyone.'_

_'People in the corridors of school these days give me sideways looks.'_

_'"That's the cowards sister," they whisper. "The dumb bitch killed herself.'_

_'They criticize my sister - calling her weak or a coward because she "took the easy route out."'_

_'What part of all this is easy?'_

_'While all of you out there are judging and hating on my sister, the victim, her murderers go free. They're not suffering, because they truly believe they're not at fault.'_

_'I made this video to show them how wrong they all are.'_

_'While you judge my sister, how about you take a second to judge them, too?'_

_'Because suicide is not an easy way out. It is not the cowards route.'_

_'Think about it. How much courage must you have to face death in the eye and embrace it? To put that blade to your wrist and cut and cut and cut until you can't anymore, because you've lost all feeling in your hands and you're going light headed and there's blood, so much blood...could you do that?'_

_'Of course not. Because suicide doesn't take courage.'_

_'It takes hatred. It takes pain, and it takes fear.'_

_'It takes a soul, broken seemingly beyond repair.'_

_'That's what those assholes did to my sister. They teased her and pushed her around mercilessly.'_

_'At first, it was just name calling in the schoolyard.'_

_'Then they began to follow her home after school. They started appearing in public, wherever she went. They posted threatening messages on her wall, where anyone could see them.'_

_'They weren't trying to hide. They wanted people to know who the new toy was.'_

_'In the months leading up to her death, Alice was living in a perpetual state of depression and fear.'_

_'Thats what suicide takes.'_

_'And what it is is utter hopelessness. It's feeling that your life is so horrible and pain filled, that death would be better. Anything would be better.'_

_'And it's made all tenkoretragoc by the fact that most people are, like my sister, driven to this by fellow human beings. Their peers.'_

_'I hope those girls who bullied my sister see this video. I hope they hear every word I've said, and I hope it burns into their brains, and remains there forever.'_

_The black screen fades transitions into a short video clip of a crying girl, almost identical to Alice, just older, and zooms in on her face._

_'And I hope they burn in hell.'_

* * *

Percy felt strange wearing a suit.

It wasn't that he didn't want to wear a suit, or that he felt Alice Bransen didn't deserve the respect of him wearing one to her memorial.

But he had been to dozens of funerals and memorials lately, and the flashiest thing he'd worn to them had been bloodstained armour.

Lately, for him 'formal funeral attire' meant torn/bloodstained/burnt/monster-slime-and-or-dust coated clothing.

He _hated_ it.

Hated the fact that, because they had been in the middle of a war, the dead didn't get the honours they deserved.

They got the rituals - strips of silk to bind the drachmas to the eyes, hymns and prayers to Hades, Thanatos and their godly parent - but it was hurried. There was no time for grief. No time for _mourning_.

Just a goodbye, and that was it.

The worst part was _now_, though - the aftermath.

Alice Bransen's death hadn't been the only suicide of late.

At least fifteen Greek demigods - the oldest nineteen, the youngest only _eleven_ - had taken their own lives since Gaia had been defeated.

_PTSD_, the medics had ruled._ It had broken them, torn their spirits to shreds and crushed not only their souls, but their wills to live_.

Because what kind of a life would it be, with all those memories buzzing around their heads?

Percy bowed his head as he entered the church.

Alice and the demigods may have committed suicide for different reasons, but their motives were the same.

For suicide was sheer desperation - the last resort of someone who is already half dead on the inside.

Even if it had been mortal problems that had driven Alice to this, that didn't make her any less important or her suffering any less painful.

_Percy would mourn both groups just the same_.

* * *

**.fin.**

* * *

[¥]

* * *

And I'm crying.

I'm sorry if I've offended you or anything, but after today, I needed to out this out there.

Because times are changing. New laws are being considered - if you bully someone and they commit suicide, you can be done for both grievous bodily harm and/or manslaughter. (These laws are still on the drawing board. They might not ever get passed.)

But I hope they do.

The girl - Alice - her story was something I made up. If it was similar to something you've heard, I'm sorry. I was trying to use my own idea to make this as fictional as possible.


End file.
